What is Home health care
Home health care is a wide range of health care services that may be provided in your house for an illness or injury. House health care is ordinarily more affordable, more suitable, and just as effective as care you get in a hospital or skilled nursing facility (SNF).
Goals of Home Health Care
The goal of home health care is to treat harm or illness. House health care can help you regain your autonomy to get better and become as self-sufficient as possible.
Background of Home Health care
Home health care is a system of care provided by skilled professionals under the direction of a physician to patients in their own homes. Home healthcare services include nursing care; physical, occupational, and speech-language therapy; and medical social services.
The aims of home medical care services are to help individuals to improve function and live with greater independence; to promote the client’s optimum degree of well being; and to assist the individual to stay at home, preventing hospitalization or admission to long-term care associations.2–4 Physicians may refer patients for home healthcare services, or the services may be requested by family members or patients.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that 8,090 home health care agencies in the United States provide care for more than 2.4 million elderly and disabled people yearly. To be eligible for Medicare reimbursement, home healthcare services must be deemed medically necessary by a doctor and provided to some homebound patients.
Furthermore, the care must be provided on a noncontinuous and intermittent basis. Medicare beneficiaries who are 85 years old or older, have low incomes, and have been in poor health have relatively high rates of home healthcare use. Common diagnoses among home health care patients comprise circulatory ailment (31 percent of patients), heart disease (16 percent), injury and poisoning (15.9 percent), musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorder (14.1 percent), and respiratory disease (11.6 percent)
Access quality of Home Health Care
The goals and multidisciplinary nature of home health care services current challenges to quality measurement that differ from those found in a more traditional hospital setting. The Outcome-Based Quality Monitoring (OBQM) software computer screens, reports, and benchmarks adverse events such as emergent care for harm brought on by fall or accident, increased amount of pressure ulcers, and substantial decline in three or even more ADLs.
A mechanism that connects a percentage of a bureau’s compensation to the delivery of care, pay for functionality, is another CMS quality initiative foreseen in the near future. In preparation, quality-improvement organizations and providers will work to identify and produce some performance measures proven powerful in-home care.
An expanded approach to quality measurement should achieve these goals: extend the patient population being evaluated, expand the kinds of quality measures, capture aspects of care directly under providers’ management, reduce variations in practice, and enhance information technology.
In the home health care community in January 2007, healthcare leaders, and quality-improvement organizations started the Home Health Quality Improvement National Campaign 2007. The effort targets enhancing the quality of patient care in home health care by providing agencies with monthly best practice intervention tools, setting.
The target is always to prevent avoidable hospitalizations for home healthcare patients. The Home Health Quality Improvement National Campaign uses a multidisciplinary method of quality improvement that features crucial home health, hospital, and doctor stakeholders.
Home Health Care delivery
The home health care environment differs from hospitals and other institutional environments where nurses work. By way of example, home healthcare nurses work in the field with support resources accessible from a central office.
The nurse-doctor work relationship involves less direct doctor contact, as well as the physician, who relies to some larger level on the nurse to make appraisals and convey findings. Home health care nurses spend more time on paperwork than hospital nurses and more time dealing with compensation dilemmas.8, 9 Certain distinguishing characteristics of your home health care environment affect patient safety and caliber of outcomes: the high degree of patient autonomy in the house setting, limited oversight of informal caregivers by professional clinicians, and situational variables unique to each house.
However, many choices are made by clinicians on behalf of hospitalized patients. In house health care, clinicians understand that the care setting—the home—is the inviolable domain of the patient. Thus, set alongside the hospitalized patient, the home health care even if particular interventions will soon be executed and the patient frequently has a larger role in determining how.
In a hospital, as an example, doctors nurses, and pharmacists all may play a part in ensuring the patient receives antibiotics at proper periods that are therapeutical. At home, but the patient may choose to take the medication at atypical times, despite advice regarding the significance of a normal medication schedule.
Hence, interventions to advertise patient safety and quality care must account for the fact that patients will sometimes decide to behave in ways that are inconsistent together with the important evidence, and the clinician’s best efforts may not result in desirable outcomes.
Along with deliberate choices made by informed and able patients regarding their care, individual patient variables may also affect home-based results in methods are not the same as those patients who are hospitalized. Colleagues10, 11 and Ellenbecker reported that financial resources all, cognitive capability, and reading skill affect the power of home healthcare patients to manage their medication regimens. Yet, none of these variables may play a significant role in the safe administration of medicines to patients that are hospitalized.
Along with self-care, some home-bound patients receive support from relatives or other informal caregivers. Professional clinicians have no power over these health professionals. For example, due to limited entry to transportation, a husband may determine never to purchase diabetic supplies for his dependent wife.
Yet, small chance to directly observe the patient and informal health professionals may hinder attempts to quickly ascertain the etiology of an adverse event.
If a home medical care patient is found with bruises the patient can’t describe, is the cause a fall, a blood dyscrasia, or physical maltreatment? In both self-care by care and patients by informal caregivers, safety and quality standards reached or may not be understood.
Another distinctive characteristic of home medical care is the fact that care is provided by clinicians to every patient in a setting that is unique. There may be situational variables that present dangers to patients which will be impossible or difficult for the clinician to remove. House healthcare clinicians will not be prone to really have the training or resources to assess and ameliorate such hazards to patient safety in the patient’s house.
Hence, an implicit aim of home health care will be to facilitate a decrease that is supported. That is patients who usually do not show clinical signals of progress may still receive quality care that results in a decelerated decrease or increased standard of living. That is consistent together with the American Nurses Association’s assertion that encouraging the patient’s optimum level of well-being is a legitimate goal of home health care.
